Thread: Books that are must reads before you die ?

Originally Posted by niftyshaving

Aha books.... I am so lucky to live within walking distance of a good little library.

I'm glad you reminded me of that. It's funny... I live about four blocks from the downtown library here in Kansas City and I can't remember the last time I went in there.

I'm sure several of these have already been mentioned, but I took a pass by my bookshelf and noted those volumes which I would have regretted not reading:

Brideshead Revisited - E. Waugh
Crime and Punishment - Dostoyevsky
The Old Curiosity Shop - Dickens
Nicholas Nickleby - Dickens
The Divine Comedy - Dante
Dubliners - J. Joyce
The Odyssey - Homer
Pride and Prejudice - J. Austen
The Art of War - Sun Tzu
Les Liaisons Dangereuses - C. De Laclos
Dracula - Stoker
Canterbury Tales - Chaucer
and The Works of Robert Frost

My goal for 2010 is to make it through Gibbon's "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", though it's a daunting read (and I keep getting sidetracked with Steve Berry novels ).

oh i love fantasy

the wheel of time series

the black magician triology

the abhorsen trology

age of the five triology

the farseer triology(and the sequels)

First off, I'll second Doc on Stranger in a Strange Land.

A few others I'd make everyone read if I could:


The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test - Tom Wolfe
Black Like Me - John Howard Griffin
Flow - Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi
Letters From the Earth - Mark Twain
Rants and Incendiary Tracts: Voices of Desperate Illumination 1558-Present
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow - Aldous Huxley (the collection of essays)
Genome - Matt Ridley
My View of the World - Erwin Schrödinger

Originally Posted by Quick Orange

(I even made it halfway through War and Peace)
Since we're all talking about classic books, let me ask this. When you read these or any other books, what approach do you take? Do you take it at face value or do you try to analyze it?

I've been meaning to read war and peace. I had to read Anna Karenina for a class and I hated every single damn character and couldn't stop thinking, "Why couldn't they assign War and Peace instead?"

I think that if you try to analyze books you're taking the wrong approach. Just read them. Then if need be reread them. The meaning manifests itself. If you finish a book without having to stop and collect yourself because it starts to overwhelm you, then it is a bad book. Unless it's Go Dog Go... that book kicks ass.

Honestly, if someone ever read The Inferno and actually said to me, "So he took a trip through hell, eh?" I might have to slap them. Then slap them again. Then everything would go black for awhile and I'd wake up in a cell.

I agree. If it's worth analyzing, it's worth reading again. A book loses its meaning if you take it sentence by sentence from the get-go. That's why I have trouble with books like War and Peace. It's so damn much to keep tabs on, from the length to the sheer number of characters, that it gets disjointed.

I like to read in as few sessions as possible so that I can get the full scope of it. It helps me to retain the information better so that in the end I have a more complete picture. In fact, my last semester at college, I had a quiz over a book that I hadn't been able to get hold of until about 3 hours before the quiz. It was what I would call a typical sized book. Reading absolutely as fast as I could, I had it read in 2.5-3 hours, skimmed some other material that was going to be quizzed, and ran my ass off to class. Those quizzes were certainly not easy, but I pulled an 85% on the book portion.

Contrast that with Dante's Inferno, which I had to read at my class's pace, and I hardly remember any of it

So much to read...So little time to do so.

Ladies and gentlemen, your suggestions are excellent--an appropriate mix of the classics, traditional and modern literature. I have perused most, but not all of them. Of those that I have read, Moby Dick is probably my favorite. William Gibson, who I became aware of this November, is on my must-read list.

As for me, I have found the following texts--some fiction, some non-fiction--to be most fulfilling, in no particular order of importance:

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk

George Orwell, Coming Up for Air

Mark Twain, Pudd 'inhead Wison

Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan

Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence

William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Linda Brent, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Sinclair Lewis, Main Street

Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience

Henry David Thoreau, A Yankee in Canada

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Eugene Sledge, With the Old Breed

The list could go on and on, but I must cease and desist from my ramblings...

A happy and prosperous New Year to all!

I am not much for fiction and fantasy I like history, philosophy, and I like most of all to get my info right from the source ie autobigraphies.

So my list would be something like this.

Meditations by Marcus Aurelious
Benjiman Franklins autobiography
Calvin Coolidges autobiography
Thomas Jeffersons autobiography
The biography of Jefferson by Dumas Malone
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
The rise and fall of the confederate government by Jefferson Davis
Thomas Paines writings
Beyond good and evil by Nietchze
And all the voltaire you can find.

Originally Posted by TexasBob

I could recommend many books I think are "great books" but there is one in particular that tops the list: Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory. See Le Morte d'Arthur - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

There are many editions of this and it is important to get a good one. What you want:
[LIST=1][*]You want a version based on the Winchester manuscript ...

Thanks for the reminder, and a very useful one; I've encountered Le Morte d'Arthur in bits and pieces since childhood and periodically think I'd like to read it through. As for þe spelyng, þæt olde styl pleseth me wel, ywis.

~Rich

Has anyone tackled 'Les Misérables by Victor Hugo'? I have a very very old copy dated 18??, it's in English. I have some friends who are insane voracious speed readers, I think that one of them has read it.
The Dangerous Book For Boys - there's one for me.
How about The Holy Bible, or is that just a given, it has been printed and published far beyond any other book, you would think that the world's best seller would have to be on the list, maybe it's just a given. It can be rough though (Lord forgive me) in places (you know like when you hit the first 9 chapters of First Chronicles, that will try most people), it is for the most part a history book but has poetry, romance, action, military statistics.

And Jimmy, thanks for starting this most fruitful and thought-provoking thread. At 59, I'm at a somewhat similar turning of the road. And there are so many books out there that I want to read ... just looking at one of our bookcases I can come up with a dozen easily. Let's see, just a few ...

Le Morte d'Arthur, obviously
Shakespeare, all the plays and poems (this will be a reread of some, but of too many a first reading)
Ulysses ... but hey, I've read the first ten or twelve pages a dozen times!
Don Quixote--I just cataloged for our library a nice two-volume Spanish edition, with Doré illustrations, and might try that
The Bible--I've read a lot of it, but never the whole thing through, start to finish--King James version that would be, unapologetically (I'm a poet, not a Biblical scholar! )
Darwin's Origin of Species
Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations
Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, plus some other books on U.S. and world history, and probably Sandburg's Lincoln biography and Grant's memoirs
The Declaration of Independence and Constitution (have read the former and parts of the latter, but want to read straight through now that I have a copy that I keep with me); also the Federalist Papers, Paine's Common Sense, Toqueville's Democracy in America, some of Jefferson's writings
Milton's Paradise Lost and Areopagitica
Updike's Rabbit books
Catch-22 of course!
Oliver Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield and She Stoops to Conquer, at least
David Copperfield, The Old Curiosity Shop, The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, aaagh just a ton of Dickens I haven't read yet
Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh
Walter Scott's Ivanhoe and Rob Roy at least
that volume of Goethe that our exchange student's parents sent me ten years ago to practice my German!!
and while I'm thinking of it, the volume of Plato my daughter gave me ...

And that's just the start--if I really read all those before I die, then I guess I'll live to be 120 or so.

~Rich